Handedness — and the related concept of chirality — are double-sided ways of understanding how matter breaks symmetries. Different-handed object pairs reveal some puzzling asymmetries in the way our universe works.
Symmetry features
Particle physics is driven by surprise. Researchers in the 1960s studying tiny but ubiquitous particles called neutrinos found only a fraction of what they expected to be in their detector. That unexpected result eventually led to the discovery that neutrinos are shape-shifters, oscillating between three types as they travel. In this stop-motion video, Symmetry writer Zack Savitsky imagines a painter discovering a similar surprise among his art supplies.
Scientists know the Higgs boson interacts with extremely massive particles. Now, they’re starting to study how it interacts with lighter particles as well.
A study conducted by the TEAM-UP task force provides a road map for doubling the number of African Americans obtaining bachelor’s degrees in physics and astronomy.
No one knows for sure what dark matter is. But we know we need something to explain what we see in the universe, and we’ve crossed a few ideas off of our list.
What does it take to publish a scientific analysis in one of the world’s largest experiments? A huge amount of meticulous work and scrutiny goes into each paper published by CMS, a collaboration of about 3,000 scientists.
A collaboration of the Americas aims to take the first pioneering images of low-energy neutrinos and provide new data to shed light on the mysterious identity of dark matter.
Hadrons count among their number the familiar protons and neutrons that make up our atoms, but they are much more than that.
The discovery of the muon originally confounded physicists. Today international experiments are using the previously perplexing particle to gain a new understanding of our world.
We know that neutrinos aren’t massless, they’re just incredibly light — a million times lighter than the next lightest particle, the electron. And they don’t seem to get their mass in the same way as other particles in the Standard Model.